Thursday, December 22, 2016
Hi/BBIAB
I havne't posted in so long because election. I have put all my history studies on hold and have flung myself fully into reading up on political psychology, effective communication, effective actvist techniques, etc etc.
Hopefully in a month or two I'll be able to come back to history, because I miss it!
Oh, I did register for the AHA conference in a couple weeks, though. Right here in Denver, how could I resist!
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Tribalism & Communication articles
Other than the books listed in the post below, I'm going to use this post to collect the articles I find on the subject of Tribalism & Communication.
- Research says there are ways to reduce racial bias. Calling people racist isn’t one of them. (Vox)
- White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo [PDF]
- Why Can't Liberals Talk to Conservatives? or What's really the Matter with Kansas? by Robert D Feinman
- Moral Politics How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lakoff
- Conservatives vs. liberals: Debating a liberal is maddening: They think conservatives are evil, while we think they're silly. By Charlotte Allen
- How to Talk Like a Conservative (If You Must): The left's linguistics guru says liberals have to watch their language. By Dave Gilson
- Psychologists Are Learning How to Convince Conservatives to Take Climate Change Seriously By Jesse Singal
- The Secret to Making Conservatives Care About Climate Change (Take Part)
Political Tribalism, understanding & communication
I've been cruisin' through Goodreads today, trying to find everything I could on the topic of Political/Moral Tribalism & how we can better understand each other & communicate across the divides.
The best way I could figure out how to share the books without taking a zillion hours formatting a blog post, is making a Tribalism & Communication Goodreads Shelf & popping the widget in here.
Let me know if you have any other suggestions, or if you've already read any of these!
The best way I could figure out how to share the books without taking a zillion hours formatting a blog post, is making a Tribalism & Communication Goodreads Shelf & popping the widget in here.
Let me know if you have any other suggestions, or if you've already read any of these!
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
Election Day Podcasts!
I'm a New Books Network podcast junkie, and I was attempting to link to some relevant-to-election-day author interviews over on FB, but there were just far too many.! So, movin' it over to blog format. This is just a quick list I have made on my lunch break, looking through the first 20 pages of the New Books in Political Science page, so this is certainly not any sort of comprehensive list!
- The Rise of Trump: America's Authoritarian Spring
- Hillary Rising: The Politics, Persona, and Policies of a New American Dynasty
- Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal
- Hillary Rodham Clinton: Some Girls are Born to Lead
- The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women's Quest for the American Presidency
- Counting Women's Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal
- Masculinity, Femininity, and American Political Behavior
- Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency
- Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965
- Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority
- From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
- Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America
- Right Moves: The Conservative American Think Tank in Political Culture since 1945
- The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How they Weaken Democracy
- Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign
- Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction
- Too Dumb Too Fail: How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections
- Why Washington Won't Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis
- Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy
- Fed Power: How Finance Wins
- Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections
- Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy
- Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States
- Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail
- Deciding What's True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism
- The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy
- The Deregulatory Moment?: A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws
- 150 Years of ObamaCare
- Rethinking the Administrative Presidency: Trust, Intellectual Capital, and Appointee-Careerist Relations in the George W. Bush Administration
- The Democracy Promotion Paradox
- Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World
- Political Advertising in the United States
- American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction
- Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World
- Secular Faith: How Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics
Thursday, November 3, 2016
Seven reasons why blogging can make you a better academic writer (pat thomson - THE)
Saw this post over on #AcWriMo today, and I feel like it justifies my focus on blogging on academic topics (none are posted yet, still working on them!) this November. I know I'm not ready to write anything formal yet, but I know that making a habit of consistently writing and blogging will help immensely. Especially with brevity and clarity! And, you know, actually sitting down and doing the writing itself. All things I very much need to work on!
Seven reasons why blogging can make you a better academic writer (pat thomson - Times Higher Education)
Lucretia Mott and I agree: Humans cannot be owned.
I have always been deeply uncomfortable with the discussion of slavery, and how every person and scholar still use the labels 'slave' and 'owner.' It's strange to me that even the most anti-slavery/anti-racists of scholars (that I've been exposed to) still use these terms. Because, to me, just because someone says that they 'own' another person, doesn't mean it's true. You can't 'own' a person.
(Although, I acknowledge the fact that this is semantics, and if you say you own someone, and, through threats of violence, you do control that person, then it does seem that you do, in fact, own them, at least in the very practical sense of the word.)
I've never really articulated this uneasiness before, and I didn't have any preferred alternative terms (as I hadn't really tried to figure any out). But, this morning on my drive to work, I was listening to a New Books Network podcast (as I do on most of my commutes)- Lillian Barger interviewing Carol Faulkner of Syracuse University on her book Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) (And which I really want to read). In it, Faulkner was talking about how Mott was a passionate and a very active abolitionist, and was extremely rigid in her beliefs, even when that resulted in some pretty cold attitudes/actions.
Like me, Mott, too, did not believe that people could be owned. To that end, she refused to participate in the buying and freeing of slaves (which many abolitionists of her day did), even opposing the purchasing and freeing of Frederick Douglas (!!!), because she believed that, in participating in the purchasing of people, even to free them, meant participating in the idea that it was even possible to own a human, which she straight up disagreed with utterly and totally. Faulkner even said that when a former slave showed up at a meeting of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, asking for funds to purchase his son, she told him no, and discouraged others from contributing. She believed that those who were enslaved, should escape. They did not need to purchase their freedom, because they are human beings, not objects. Not property.
Now, I certainly would have given every cent I had to the man asking to buy/free his child (unless I was in a position to help him escape otherwise), but at the same time, I do understand, and mostly respect where she is coming from. She is more rigid than I am, or would have been (though I would have been extremely active in helping escaped slaves more than supporting the idea of buying freedoms), but I think that was the first time, strangely, that I heard someone else say, essentially "The institution of slavery? F#*k that. They are people being held prisoners by captors, and we should help them escape, and ban the practice of capturing people and controlling them with violence. They are not property or ownable just because money is exchanged in the trading of these captured bodies." Those are my words, formed while listening to this interview, but very well illustrative of both my and Lucretia Mott's stance, I think.
It's so strange to think that I can't remember coming across this specific idea/stance before. I am quite active in both anti-racist and history circles, and slavery and the abhorrent wrongness is something I hear talk about constantly.. but sometimes things are just said in a slightly different way that leads to that lightbulb moment.
So, this is my declaration of semantic change: I'm going to try to no longer use the terms 'slave' or 'owners' whenever possible, but switch them out for, I think, 'captives'-- maybe prisoners? But that seems to implicate possible wrongdoing on their part, and they aren't quite prisoners of 'war'. Prisoners of capitalism? Prisoners of greed? Hmm. Maybe I'll stick with captives for now. And I will call a spade a spade and those that called themselves slave-owners, are 'captors'. I wish that word had more of a connotation with violence, but it's the best word I know of now.
I don't know much about linguistics/psychology, but there must be the idea that how you talk about things matter, and 'slavery' and 'slave-owners' are such common terms, that they almost.. reinforce the legitimacy of the institution, even when speaking against it.
So, these are my thoughts from this mornings commute. If anyone knows of anyone else who has written or spoken on these ideas, please let me know in the comments! I know I'm certainly not the only person who feels this way, and I'd love to find out what sort of language others have used to talk about this.
(Although, I acknowledge the fact that this is semantics, and if you say you own someone, and, through threats of violence, you do control that person, then it does seem that you do, in fact, own them, at least in the very practical sense of the word.)
I've never really articulated this uneasiness before, and I didn't have any preferred alternative terms (as I hadn't really tried to figure any out). But, this morning on my drive to work, I was listening to a New Books Network podcast (as I do on most of my commutes)- Lillian Barger interviewing Carol Faulkner of Syracuse University on her book Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) (And which I really want to read). In it, Faulkner was talking about how Mott was a passionate and a very active abolitionist, and was extremely rigid in her beliefs, even when that resulted in some pretty cold attitudes/actions.
Like me, Mott, too, did not believe that people could be owned. To that end, she refused to participate in the buying and freeing of slaves (which many abolitionists of her day did), even opposing the purchasing and freeing of Frederick Douglas (!!!), because she believed that, in participating in the purchasing of people, even to free them, meant participating in the idea that it was even possible to own a human, which she straight up disagreed with utterly and totally. Faulkner even said that when a former slave showed up at a meeting of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, asking for funds to purchase his son, she told him no, and discouraged others from contributing. She believed that those who were enslaved, should escape. They did not need to purchase their freedom, because they are human beings, not objects. Not property.
Now, I certainly would have given every cent I had to the man asking to buy/free his child (unless I was in a position to help him escape otherwise), but at the same time, I do understand, and mostly respect where she is coming from. She is more rigid than I am, or would have been (though I would have been extremely active in helping escaped slaves more than supporting the idea of buying freedoms), but I think that was the first time, strangely, that I heard someone else say, essentially "The institution of slavery? F#*k that. They are people being held prisoners by captors, and we should help them escape, and ban the practice of capturing people and controlling them with violence. They are not property or ownable just because money is exchanged in the trading of these captured bodies." Those are my words, formed while listening to this interview, but very well illustrative of both my and Lucretia Mott's stance, I think.
It's so strange to think that I can't remember coming across this specific idea/stance before. I am quite active in both anti-racist and history circles, and slavery and the abhorrent wrongness is something I hear talk about constantly.. but sometimes things are just said in a slightly different way that leads to that lightbulb moment.
So, this is my declaration of semantic change: I'm going to try to no longer use the terms 'slave' or 'owners' whenever possible, but switch them out for, I think, 'captives'-- maybe prisoners? But that seems to implicate possible wrongdoing on their part, and they aren't quite prisoners of 'war'. Prisoners of capitalism? Prisoners of greed? Hmm. Maybe I'll stick with captives for now. And I will call a spade a spade and those that called themselves slave-owners, are 'captors'. I wish that word had more of a connotation with violence, but it's the best word I know of now.
I don't know much about linguistics/psychology, but there must be the idea that how you talk about things matter, and 'slavery' and 'slave-owners' are such common terms, that they almost.. reinforce the legitimacy of the institution, even when speaking against it.
So, these are my thoughts from this mornings commute. If anyone knows of anyone else who has written or spoken on these ideas, please let me know in the comments! I know I'm certainly not the only person who feels this way, and I'd love to find out what sort of language others have used to talk about this.
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
New layout!
After fighting with blogger all day yesterday, trying to just get the template page to load so I could upload a new template, I finally figured it out & fixed it. So, new layout! Huzzah!
Buuuut, this is the free version of this layout, and it seems like I can't really adjust much of anything unless I go into the code, and I have, but I can't seem to figure it out. :\ So... this is a temporary layout, or state-of-the-layout, for now. But, it's still an improvement.
Now I need to make a header, figure out how to make the top bar less ugly, and to stop the ugly no-picture-available picture from always showing up. Hmm...
Monday, October 31, 2016
My first #AcWriMo!
#AcWriMo starts tomorrow! I am participating, though I don't think I will be truly writing academically. I'm not quite there yet in my #homegradschooling, though I'm pretty close.
So, I think this November will be, for me, about writing my academic subject/interest(s), but aimed at this here blog, as well as a bit for my Unitarian Universalist church's newsletter (I just joined the archives team & volunteered to start a 'column' on UU history.)
I've been out of school for 3 years now, and my writing is extremely rusty (and by that I mean it sucks), not to mention that I have no habit of writing or time built into my schedule for it anymore, so I'm hoping this will help me really gear up and grease the mental wheels before I attempt to dive in to journal article writing (and hopefully I'll be able to turn some of my blog writings into a more formal piece of writing down the road.)
Here are just a few of the articles I have been reading to prepare myself:
So, I think this November will be, for me, about writing my academic subject/interest(s), but aimed at this here blog, as well as a bit for my Unitarian Universalist church's newsletter (I just joined the archives team & volunteered to start a 'column' on UU history.)
I've been out of school for 3 years now, and my writing is extremely rusty (and by that I mean it sucks), not to mention that I have no habit of writing or time built into my schedule for it anymore, so I'm hoping this will help me really gear up and grease the mental wheels before I attempt to dive in to journal article writing (and hopefully I'll be able to turn some of my blog writings into a more formal piece of writing down the road.)
Here are just a few of the articles I have been reading to prepare myself:
literature review step one, scoping. #acwrimo work in progress (patter)I'm going to be coming into work about an hour early to take advantage of the nicer computer & the fact that I can't do anything while sitting at home (and I have no laptop!), and possibly stay a bit later, we'll see. Good luck to everyone else who is participating in any of the WriMos!
not all literature ‘reviews’ are the same (patter)
doing the literature review – thinking about patterns and groups (patter)
mapping your literatures (patter)
dealing with the space between literatures (patter)
literature know-how – beware too much naming, not enough framing (patter)
History Resources (University of Mary Washington)
Thesis Whisperer's Top Tips
Sunday, October 23, 2016
Kew's Forgotten Queen: Marianne North
How excited was I when the BBC put out a documentary about one of the women I read about in my studies on Imperial-era Women travelers?! SUPER. I watch an obscene amount of BBC documentaries every month, but they're rarely about anyone or anything I study specifically. And, while Marianne North isn't my Isabella Bird, she has been in several of the books and articles I've read lately (such as Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Ninteenth-Century American West).
I assume North got a whole show on herself due to the collection of botanical paintings she left to Kew Gardens and it probably needed a bit of publicity, but really I wish they would have just gone all in and done a whole series on her (BBC history docs are usually a series of around 3 'films', an hour each).
While this one-off special was enjoyable to watch, and actress Emilia Fox was adorably and appropriately excited to learn about her and follow in her footsteps, it's treatment of North was, of course, quite superficial. My BBC ladies, Drs. Amanda Vickery & Lucy Worsley, do such a great job in giving their topics some intersectional feminist 3-dimentionality, I suppose I'm just spoiled now. There just wasn't enough time to do any imperial traveler justice with only one film/episode!
This is particularly unfortunate because it's a show about an imperialist, shown on BBC, with pretty much no mention at all about the negative aspects of imperialism that her work helped to perpetuate (by giving British folks a taste of all the flora and fauna out there in the wild, that they then wanted to go and see and collect, encouraging the continual greedy and entitled Imperial British presence in countries all around the world). Awkward.
But, I was still able to turn my academic brain off long enough to just enjoy the ride. If you have a British ISP you can watch it on iPlayer for the next few days, otherwise, BBC shows can often be found on youtube!
I assume North got a whole show on herself due to the collection of botanical paintings she left to Kew Gardens and it probably needed a bit of publicity, but really I wish they would have just gone all in and done a whole series on her (BBC history docs are usually a series of around 3 'films', an hour each).
While this one-off special was enjoyable to watch, and actress Emilia Fox was adorably and appropriately excited to learn about her and follow in her footsteps, it's treatment of North was, of course, quite superficial. My BBC ladies, Drs. Amanda Vickery & Lucy Worsley, do such a great job in giving their topics some intersectional feminist 3-dimentionality, I suppose I'm just spoiled now. There just wasn't enough time to do any imperial traveler justice with only one film/episode!
This is particularly unfortunate because it's a show about an imperialist, shown on BBC, with pretty much no mention at all about the negative aspects of imperialism that her work helped to perpetuate (by giving British folks a taste of all the flora and fauna out there in the wild, that they then wanted to go and see and collect, encouraging the continual greedy and entitled Imperial British presence in countries all around the world). Awkward.
But, I was still able to turn my academic brain off long enough to just enjoy the ride. If you have a British ISP you can watch it on iPlayer for the next few days, otherwise, BBC shows can often be found on youtube!
Within Kew Gardens stands an extraordinary gallery, celebrating the work of one of the most prolific botanical artists of the Victorian age. At a time when women barely left their parlour rooms, Marianne North's globe-trotting exploits defied convention as she travelled alone at the height of the British Empire. From Borneo and Brazil, to Japan, South Africa, Australia and India, she fearlessly navigated the world twice over in her pursuit of capturing every living plant on canvas.Actress Emilia Fox tells the story of how this Victorian rebel changed the face of botanical research, propelling her to the top of a male-dominated world of science and exploration, gaining the admiration of Charles Darwin and even Queen Victoria. Retracing Marianne's footsteps and her passion for the natural world, Emilia revisits the awe-inspiring locations of some of her greatest experiences.With exclusive access to Kew Gardens and Marianne's wealth of personal memoirs, letters and paintings, this is a tantalizing tale of a visionary who rejected marriage and social convention for a pioneering life of conservation and adventure. Her artistic legacy remains as mesmerising today as it was in 1882 when her gallery opened at Kew Gardens.
Thursday, October 20, 2016
Learning to Do History outside of Academia
Since I'm currently on my own with my studies, I haven't had any senior historians taking me under their wings and teaching me how to actually.. you know... do history. I feel that lack of guidance acutely at times.
I've been at all this for some months, though, and I've managed to find a few resources that have been a significant help in how to conceptualize the work of a historian, as well as learning how actual research and actual writing is done. These aren't the only History podcasts I listen to, but they are the ones that either explicitly talk about how Historians do/should think & how actual research and writing is done (like the first few), or ones that talk to authors of historical books and are particularly helpful to hear how other researchers actually work.
Podcasts:
The Way of Improvement Leads Home
Doing History Series on Ben Franklin's World
Practicing History
The Art of the Review
Ben Franklin's World
New Books in Biography
New Books in History
Academia-oriented blogs:
(Not history-specific, but have also been quite helpful)
Thesis Whisperer
The Research Whisperer
PhD Talk
Get A Life, PhD
ProfHacker
Tenure, She Wrote
The Professor Is In
Inside Higher Ed
I've been at all this for some months, though, and I've managed to find a few resources that have been a significant help in how to conceptualize the work of a historian, as well as learning how actual research and actual writing is done. These aren't the only History podcasts I listen to, but they are the ones that either explicitly talk about how Historians do/should think & how actual research and writing is done (like the first few), or ones that talk to authors of historical books and are particularly helpful to hear how other researchers actually work.
Podcasts:
The Way of Improvement Leads Home
Doing History Series on Ben Franklin's World
Practicing History
The Art of the Review
Ben Franklin's World
New Books in Biography
New Books in History
Academia-oriented blogs:
(Not history-specific, but have also been quite helpful)
Thesis Whisperer
The Research Whisperer
PhD Talk
Get A Life, PhD
ProfHacker
Tenure, She Wrote
The Professor Is In
Inside Higher Ed
I've also been finding other historians to add on Twitter and Academia.edu on the social media side of things. It's hard to bee too active on Twitter currently, as I spend all day at my day job (no twittering there!) and then at home I rarely get on a computer. I need to figure out a good plan for that. And of course, Academia.edu is a bit sad when you don't actually have any papers of your own to list! But, hopefully I will someday!
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
Finally, an introduction
Okay, I need to use this blog for more than keeping track of the podcasts I listen to (though I need to do a better job about that, as well).
I keep not-writing because It's been so long since I've written anything in any serious(/ish) capacity, and I know I'm horribly rusty. And, I feel like my thoughts aren't yet particularly coherent on any of it.
So, of course, writing a whole bunch is exactly what I NEED to do to for both of those issues. So, I'm going to start trying to write regularly, even if only a bit, even if it's not great writing or entirely coherent.
It also strikes me that I haven't made any kind of intro post yet either. So, I suppose I should start with that!
I'm Ameya. My educational background is complicated enough to warrant it's own post sometime, but in super-short, I have my B.Sc. in City & Regional Planning from The Ohio State University (2013), and I'm planning on going back to school for a PhD in History (my life-long love) when I can afford it, but that will take at least a few years.
I'm not waiting for school to dive right in, though. This #homegradschooling project comes out of the fact that I "homeschooled myself" (no input from any adult whatsoever) after I left high school at age 15 (I bounced in and out of both HS and college for years), and this is just a far more rigorous and academic-y version of that.
I haven't managed to articulate my research interests very well yet, and they are still developing anyway. But, my current focus of interest started from a love of Imperial-Era British Women's Travel Writing (Especially Isabella Bird), but a significant discomfort in how very very problematic the works always are. I realized how little vocabulary and conceptual frameworks I had to make sense of and explain these issues, so I started digging into papers and books related to the topic.
While I'm still studying that, I have expanded my scope to learn what I can about issues such as scientific racism, social darwinism, discourses of feminity, imperialist discourses, intersections of race-class-gender, female intellectualism, social theory, social control, critical theory, etc.
Everything I read leads me to more new concepts which I then feel a pressing need to dive into. It's both heaven and hell for a legitimately ADD researcher for myself. There is so much to learn, and I love it, but there is very little focus in my studies right now, as I bounce around from idea to idea.
But, it's alright. I really do have so much to learn, and, what I see as one advantage of my particular brain, is how very interdisciplinary it is, and good at synthesizing information from various different fields. The time will come where I will focus myself more intently on certain things, but for now I'm just getting a broad overview of all the various topics that are related to the 19th century/early 20th century British and American women writers, thinkers, and travelers and their brilliant and extremely problematic works.
In fact, I need to go work on this blog and organize my reading lists and other bloggy things. Note to self: I really need to learn how to end blog posts....
I keep not-writing because It's been so long since I've written anything in any serious(/ish) capacity, and I know I'm horribly rusty. And, I feel like my thoughts aren't yet particularly coherent on any of it.
So, of course, writing a whole bunch is exactly what I NEED to do to for both of those issues. So, I'm going to start trying to write regularly, even if only a bit, even if it's not great writing or entirely coherent.
It also strikes me that I haven't made any kind of intro post yet either. So, I suppose I should start with that!
I'm Ameya. My educational background is complicated enough to warrant it's own post sometime, but in super-short, I have my B.Sc. in City & Regional Planning from The Ohio State University (2013), and I'm planning on going back to school for a PhD in History (my life-long love) when I can afford it, but that will take at least a few years.
I'm not waiting for school to dive right in, though. This #homegradschooling project comes out of the fact that I "homeschooled myself" (no input from any adult whatsoever) after I left high school at age 15 (I bounced in and out of both HS and college for years), and this is just a far more rigorous and academic-y version of that.
I haven't managed to articulate my research interests very well yet, and they are still developing anyway. But, my current focus of interest started from a love of Imperial-Era British Women's Travel Writing (Especially Isabella Bird), but a significant discomfort in how very very problematic the works always are. I realized how little vocabulary and conceptual frameworks I had to make sense of and explain these issues, so I started digging into papers and books related to the topic.
While I'm still studying that, I have expanded my scope to learn what I can about issues such as scientific racism, social darwinism, discourses of feminity, imperialist discourses, intersections of race-class-gender, female intellectualism, social theory, social control, critical theory, etc.
Everything I read leads me to more new concepts which I then feel a pressing need to dive into. It's both heaven and hell for a legitimately ADD researcher for myself. There is so much to learn, and I love it, but there is very little focus in my studies right now, as I bounce around from idea to idea.
But, it's alright. I really do have so much to learn, and, what I see as one advantage of my particular brain, is how very interdisciplinary it is, and good at synthesizing information from various different fields. The time will come where I will focus myself more intently on certain things, but for now I'm just getting a broad overview of all the various topics that are related to the 19th century/early 20th century British and American women writers, thinkers, and travelers and their brilliant and extremely problematic works.
In fact, I need to go work on this blog and organize my reading lists and other bloggy things. Note to self: I really need to learn how to end blog posts....
Friday, June 10, 2016
Podcast: Philosophize This! - How to Win an Argument Pt. 2 (Logical Fallacies)
Second part! I liked compiling the last list. I'm a very visual person, so the comics and memes help reinforce these ideas for me.
- Red Herring (Wiki, Fallacy Files)
- Argument from Authority // Appeal to Authority (Wiki, Fallacy Files)
- Begging the Question // Circular Reasoning (Wiki, Fallacy Files)
- Black and/or White Fallacy // Either/or Fallacy // False Dilemma (Wiki, Fallacy Files)
Hasty Generalization // Fallacy of Insufficient Sample (Wiki, Fallacy Files)
Podcast: Philosophize This! - How to Win an Argument Pt. 1 (Logical Fallacies)
Listened to this on the drive to work this morning.
I've been fascinated by the still rather-new-to-me concept of Logical Fallacies (6 years of college and I never ran into them before?!?! Ugh.) and with things like this, sometimes it takes me a bunch of exposure before it really starts to stick. Philosophize This! is actually the first podcast I ever downloaded, but then I got distracted by some other great 'casts, and went without listening to any at all for a month or so-- but I've started listening once more, and I must say it's one of my favorite podcasts out there. Stephen West does a great job of making things simple and easy to absorb.
In this episode he talks about the importance of learning to craft and refute arguments well, and thus the necessity of understanding logical fallacies. He goes on to discuss several, which I will list here, with illustrations (first two pictures from An Illustrated Guide to Logical Fallacies, which has been sitting in my Amazon Wishlist for ages!)
- Argument from Consequences / Appeal to Consequences (Wiki, Fallacy Files)
- Affirming the Consequent (Wiki, Fallacy Files)
- Argument from Ignorance // Appeal to Ignorance (Wiki, Fallacy Files)
- Argument from Incredulity // Lack of Imagination (Wiki)
- Straw Man (Wiki, Fallacy Files)
- Ad Hominem (Wiki, Fallacy Files)
- Appeal to the Bandwagon // Appeal to Popularity \\ Argument by Consensus (Wiki, Fallacy Files)
Hark, a blog!
When I was a teenager, I left high school to home school myself. And now, as an adult, as I can't afford to go to grad school, I'm homeschooling myself again-- at the grad school level this time!
College is expensive. Really, really expensive. Undergrad alone cost me 70k!, and I don't have the ability right now to up and move to any school that accept me *and* give me that illusive humanities funding that I would need. But, I also need to learn, regardless. I need mental stimulation and intellectual goals to keep me going. (And, one day, I might actually try harder to get into an official grad school program, and need to prepare myself for it!)
So, I've recently started taking my constant reading/learning in a more organized direction, and found myself starting to call this project of mine home(grad)schooling myself on Women's Colonial-Era Travel Writing. And, unsurprisingly, the hardest part about this solo-journey, is not having anyone to talk to about any of it.
Thus, I have started a blog! Though I've been scribbling in my notebook, it'll help me learn how to write well if I force myself to write and summarize and think "outloud" here, and it will give me a place to share some of the fascinating/super helpful things and resources I come across.
So, welcome to my blog, and thanks for reading!
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